by Thomas Mann
The reader can picture Adrian’s mirth at the drolly dejected reproduction of scenes experienced with youthful intensity. Of course we had always to check our merriment and remember that this Avas the narrator’s father we were dealing with. Rüdiger assured us that the elder’s feeling of social inferiority had communicated itself to them all in greater or less degree: he himself had taken it with him, a sort of spiritual wound, from his parents’ house. Apparently his irritation over it was one of the reasons why he would not give his father the satisfaction of wiping out the stain in the person of his son, for he had frustrated the elder’s hope of seeing the younger a member of government. Rüdiger had finished at the gymnasium and gone to the university. But he had not even got so far as an assessorship, devoting himself to literature instead, and preferring to forfeit any assistance from home rather than to satisfy the father’s obnoxious wishes. He wrote poems in free verse, critical essays and short stories in a neat prose style. But partly under economic pressure, partly also because his own production was not exactly copious, he devoted most of his time to translation, chiefly from his favourite language, English. He not only supplied several publishers with German versions of English and American literary provender, but also got himself commissioned by a Munich publisher of de luxe editions and literary curiosities to translate English classics, Skelton’s dramatic moralities, some pieces of Fletcher and Webster, certain didactic poems of Pope; and he was responsible for excellent German editions of Swift and Richardson. He supplied this sort of product with well-found prefaces, and contributed to his translations a great deal of conscientiousness, taste, and feeling for style, likewise a preoccupation with the exactness of the reproduction, matching phrase for phrase and falling more and more victim to the charms and penalties of translation. But his work was accompanied by a mental state which on another plane resembled his father’s. He felt himself to be a born writer, and spoke bitterly of being driven by necessity to till another’s field, wearing himself out on work which only distinguished him in a way he found insulting. He wanted to be a poet, in his own estimation he was one; that on account of his tiresome daily bread he had to sink to a middleman’s position in literature put him in a critical and derogatory frame towards the contributions of others and was the subject of his daily plaint. “If only I had time,” he used to say, “if I could work instead of drudging, I would show them!” Adrian was inclined to believe it, but I, perhaps judging too harshly, suspected that what he considered an obstacle was really a welcome pretext with which he deceived himself over his lack of a genuine and telling creative impulse.
With all this, one must not imagine him as morose or sullen; on the contrary he was very jolly, even rather feather-headed, gifted with a definitely Anglo-Saxon sense of humour and in character just that which the English call boyish. He was always immediately acquainted with all the sons of Albion who came to Leipzig as tourists, idlers, music-students; talked with them with complete elective adaptation of his speech to theirs, chattering nonsense thirteen to the dozen and imitating irresistibly their struggles in German, their accents, their all too correct mistakes in ordinary everyday exchange, their foreign weakness for the written language: as for instance Besichtigen Sie jenes! when all they meant was: Sehen Sie das! And he looked just like them. I have not yet mentioned his appearance: it was very good, and—apart from the clothes, shabby and always the same, to which his poverty condemned him—elegant and gentlemanly, and rather sporting. His features were striking, their aristocratic character marred only by a soft, loose-lipped mouth such as I have often noticed among Silesians. Tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged, narrow-hipped, he wore day in, day out the same checked breeches, the worse for wear, long woollen stockings, stout yellow shoes, a coarse linen shirt open at the throat, and over it a jacket of a colour already vague, with sleeves that were a little short. But his hands were very aristocratic, with long fingers and beautifully shaped, oval, rounded nails. The whole was so undeniably “portrait of a gentleman” that in his everyday clothes, in themselves an offense to society, he could frequent circles where evening dress was the rule. The women preferred him just as he was to his rivals in correct black and white, and at such receptions he might be seen surrounded by unaffectedly admiring femininity.
And yet! And again! His needy exterior, excused by the tiresome want of money, could not affect adversely his rank as cavalier and gentleman or prevent the native truth from showing through and counteracting it. But this very “truth” was itself in part a deception, and in this complicated sense Schildknapp was a fraud. He looked like an athlete, but his looks were misleading, for he practised no sport, except a little skiing with his English friends in winter in the Saxon Alps; and he was subject to a catarrh of the bladder, which in my opinion was not quite negligible. Despite his tanned face and broad shoulders his health was not always sound and as a younger man he had spit blood; in other words, tended to be tubercular. The women were not quite so lucky with him as he was with them, so far as I saw; at least not individually, for collectively they enjoyed his entire devotion. It was a roving, all-embracing devotion, it referred to the sex as such, and the possibilities for happiness presented to him by the entire world; for the single instance found him inactive, frugal, reserved. That he could have as many love-affairs as he chose seemed to satisfy him, it was as though he shrank from every connection with the actual because he saw therein a theft from the possible. The potential was his kingdom, its endless spaces his domain—therein and thus far he was really a poet. He had concluded from his name that his forebears had been giant attendants on knights and princes, and although he had never sat a horse, nor ever tried to do so, he felt himself a born horseman. He ascribed it to atavistic memory, a blood heritage, that he very often dreamed of riding; he was uncommonly convincing when he showed us how natural it was for him to hold the reins in the left hand and pat the horse’s neck with the right.—The most common phrase in his mouth was “One ought to.” It was the formula for a wistful reflection upon possibilities for the fulfilment of which the resolve was lacking. One ought to do—this and that, have this or that. One ought to write a novel about Leipzig society: one ought, if even as a dish-washer, to take a trip round the world; one ought to study physics, astronomy; one ought to acquire a little land and cultivate the soil in the sweat of one’s brow. If we went into a grocery to have some coffee ground, he was capable of saying when we came out, with a contemplative head-shake: “One ought to keep a grocery.”
I have referred to his feeling of independence. It had expressed itself early, in his rejection of government service and choice of a freelance life. Yet he was on the other hand the servant of many gentlemen and had something of the parasite about him. And why should he not, with his narrow means, make use of his good exterior and social popularity? He got himself invited out a good deal, ate luncheon here and there in Leipzig houses, even in rich Jewish ones, though one might hear him drop anti-Semitic remarks. People who feel slighted, not treated according to their deserts, yet rejoice in an aristocratic physique, often seek satisfaction in racial self-assertion. The special thing in his case was that he did not like the Germans either, was saturated with their social and national sense of inferiority and expressed it by saying that he would just as soon or sooner stick with the Jews. On their side, the Jewish publishers’ wives and bankers’ ladies looked up to him with the profound admiration of their race for German master-blood and long legs and greatly enjoyed making him presents: the knitted stockings, belts, sweaters, and scarves which he wore were mostly gifts, and not always quite unprompted. When he went shopping with a lady he might point to something and say: “Well, I would not spend any money on that. At most I would take it for a gift.” And took it for a gift, with the bearing of one who had certainly said he would not give money for it. For the rest, he asserted his independence to himself and others by the fundamental refusal to be obliging: when one needed him, he was definitely not to be had. If a place was vacant at
dinner and he was asked to fill in, he unfailingly declined. If somebody wished to assure himself of an agreeable companion for a prescribed sojourn at a cure, Schildknapp’s refusal was the more certain the clearer it was that the other set store by his company. It was thus he had rejected Adrian’s proposal that he make the libretto for Love’s Labour’s Lost. Yet he was fond of Adrian, he was really attached to him, and Adrian did not take it ill that he refused. He was altogether very tolerant of Schildknapp’s weaknesses, over which the man himself laughed; and much too grateful for his sympathetic talk, his stories about his father, his English whimsies, to have wished to bear him a grudge. I have never seen Adrian laugh so much, laugh even to tears, as when he and Rüdiger Schildknapp were together. A true humorist, the latter knew how to draw a momentarily overwhelming f unniness from the most unlikely things. It is a fact that the chewing of a dry rusk fills the ears of the chewer with a deafening crunch, shutting him away from the outer world; and Schildknapp demonstrated at tea that a rusk-chewing company could not possibly understand each other and would have to confine themselves to “What did you say?”
“Did you speak?”
“Just a moment, please!” How Adrian would laugh when Schildknapp fell out with his own reflection in the mirror! He was vain, that is, not in a common way, but in poetic reference to the endless potential of happiness in the world, far outbidding his own power of resolution, for which he wished to keep himself young and handsome; he was aggrieved at the tendency of his face to be prematurely wrinkled and weather-beaten. And his mouth did have something old-man about it, together with the nose drooping straight down over it, which otherwise one was willing to call classic. One could readily see how Rüdiger would look when he was old, adding a wrinkled brow, lines from nose to mouth, and various crow’s-feet. He would approach his features mistrustfully to the glass, pull a wry face, hold his chin with thumb and forefinger, stroke his cheek in disgust and then wave his face away with the other hand so expressively that we, Adrian and I, burst out in loud laughter.
What I have not yet mentioned is that his eyes were exactly the same colour as Adrian’s. There was really a remarkable similarity: they showed just the same mixture of blue, grey, and green, and both had the same rust-coloured ring round the pupil. However strange it may sound, it always seemed to me, seemed so with a certain soothing conviction, that Adrian’s laughter-loving friendship for Schildknapp had to do with this likeness in the colour of their eyes—which is equivalent to saying that it rested upon an indifference as profound as it was light-hearted. I scarcely need to add that they always addressed each other with their last names and Sie. If I did not know how to entertain Adrian as Schildknapp did, I did have our childhood tie, our du, to my advantage over the Silesian.
CHAPTER XXI
This morning, while my good Helene was preparing our morning drink and a brisk Upper Bavarian autumn day began to clear away the usual early mists, I read in my paper of the successful revival of our submarine warfare, to which inside twenty-four hours not less than twelve ships, among them two large passenger steamers, an English and a Brazilian, with five hundred passengers, have fallen victim. We owe this success to a new torpedo of fabulous properties which German technicians have succeeded in constructing, and I cannot repress a certain satisfaction over our ever alert spirit of invention, our national gift of not being swerved aside by however many set-backs. It stands wholly and entirely at the service of the regime which brought us into this war, laid the Continent literally at our feet and replaced the intellectual’s dream of a European Germany with the upsetting, rather brittle reality, intolerable, so it seems to the rest of the world, of a German Europe. But my involuntary satisfaction gives way to the thought that such incidental triumphs as the new sinkings or the splendid commando feat of snatching the fallen dictator of Italy from his prison can only serve to arouse false hopes and lengthen out a war which in the view of any reasonable and sensible man can no longer be won. Such is also the opinion of the head of our Freising theological seminary, Monsignor Hinterpfortner; he has confessed it to me in so many words, in private conversation as we sat over our evening glasses—a man who has nothing in common with the passionate scholar about whom in the summer the Munich student uprising centred, so horribly quenched in blood. Monsignor Hinterpfortner’s knowledge of the world permits him no illusion, not even that which clings to the distinction between losing the war and not winning it. For that only veils the truth that we have played va banque and that the failure of our hopes of world conquest amounts to a first-class national catastrophe.
I say all this to remind the reader of the historical conditions under which I am setting down Leverkühn’s biography, and to point out how the excited state bound up with my subject constantly assimilates itself to that produced by the shattering events of the time. I do not speak of distraction; for—at least so it seems to me—events have not actually the power of distracting me from my task. Even so, and despite my personal security, I may say that the times are not precisely favourable to the steady pursuance of such a work as this. And, moreover, just during the Munich disorders and executions, I got an influenza with fever and chills, which for ten days confined me to my bed and necessarily affected for some time the physical and mental powers of a man now sixty years old. It is no wonder that spring and summer have passed into autumn, and autumn is now well advanced, since I committed to paper the first lines of this narrative. Meanwhile we have experienced the destruction of our noble cities from the air, a destruction that would cry to heaven if we who suffer were not ourselves laden with guilt. As it is, the cry is smothered in our throats; like King Claudius’s prayer, it can “never to heaven go.” There is outcry over these crimes against culture, crimes that we ourselves invoked; how strange it sounds in the mouths of those who trod the boards of history as the heralds and bringers of a world-rejuvenating barbarism, revelling in atrocity. Several times the shattering, headlong destruction has come breathtakingly near my retreat. The frightful bombardment of the city of Durer and Willibald Pirkheimer was no remote event; and when the last judgment fell on Munich too, I sat pallid, shaking like the walls, the doors, and the windowpanes in my study—and with trembling hand wrote on at this story of a life. For my hand trembles in any case, on account of my subject; it cannot much matter to me that it trembles a little more due to terror from without.
We have lived through, with the sort of hope and pride which the unfolding of German might must rouse in us, the new offensive of our Wehrmacht against the Russian hordes defending their inhospitable but obviously dearly loved land. It was an offensive which after a few weeks passed over into a Russian one and since then has led to endless, unavoidable abandonment of territory—to speak only of territory. With profound consternation we read of the landing of American and Canadian troops on the southeast coast of Sicily, the fall of Syracuse, Catania, Messina, Taormina. We learned, with a mixture of terror and envy—pierced by the knowledge that we ourselves were not capable of it, in either a good or a bad sense—how a country whose mental state still permitted it to draw the foregone conclusion from a succession of scandalous defeats and losses relieved itself of its great man, in order somewhat later to submit to unconditional surrender. That is what the world demands of us too, but to consent to it our most desperate situation would still be much too holy and dear. Yes, we are an utterly different people; we deny and reject the foregone conclusion; we are a people of mightily tragic soul, and our love belongs to fate—to any fate, if only it be one, even destruction kindling heaven with the crimson flames of the death of the gods!
The advance of the Muscovites into our destined granary, the Ukraine, and the elastic retreat of our troops to the Dnieper line accompanied my work, or rather my work accompanied those events. Some days since, the untenability of this defence line too seems proved, although our Führer, hurrying up, ordered a mighty halt to the retreat, uttered his trenchant rebuke, the words “Stalingrad psychosis,” and commanded that t
he line of the Dnieper be held at all costs. The price, any price, was paid, in vain; whither, how far, the red flood the papers speak of will still pour on is left to our powers of imagination—and these are already inclined to reckless excess. For it belongs in the realm of the fantastic, it offends against all order and expectation that Germany itself should become the theatre of one of Germany’s wars. Twenty-five years ago at the very last moment we escaped that fate. But now our increasingly tragic and heroic psychology seems to prevent us from quitting a lost cause before the unthinkable becomes fact. Thank God, wide stretches still lie between our home soil and destruction rushing on from the east. We may be prepared to take some painful losses now on this front in order to defend in greater strength our European territory against the deadly enemies of the German order advancing from the west. The invasion of our beautiful Sicily by no means proved that it was possible for the foe to gain a footing on the Italian mainland. But unhappily it did turn out to be possible, while in Naples last week a communistic revolt broke out in support of the Allies which made that city appear no longer a place worthy of German troops. After conscientious destruction of the library, and leaving a time-bomb behind in the post-office, we made our exit with our heads high. And now there is talk of invasion tests in the Channel, supposed to be covered with ships, and the civilian takes unlawful leave to ask himself whether what happened in Italy and farther up the peninsula can happen, all the prescribed beliefs in the inviolability of Fortress Europa to the contrary, also in France or some other place.
